In my last blogpost, I invited people to tell me what they’d like me to write about in future posts. The top responses were “the stories behind my stories” and my “tips and lessons learned about the craft and business of writing.” A perfect pairing, as my blog is intended for readers and writers.
To kick this off, here then is the story behind the first novel I wrote, The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno.
I’ve always enjoyed history—a gift from my dad, who loved learning about the Civil War and the Old West—and I’ve always told stories. The latter is an oblique way of saying I’m a born liar (I told lies as a kid even when I wasn’t in trouble, just to see what I could get away with). In the year 2000, I finally heeded my wife’s suggestions to start writing a novel. Naturally, I chose historical fiction as my first genre. But what to write about?
Thanks to my father’s historical interests, I’d developed a fascination with Texas, which is more like a separate country than a mere state, both in size and culture. One day, as I slouched in the stacks of the Roswell, Georgia Public Library, reading a book of Texas history, I came across a footnote on a chapter about immigrant experiences during the Great Depression. An inveterate fan of footnotes (again, thanks, Dad), I read a notation stating that between 1928 and 1941, the US government deported over two million people of Mexican heritage; perhaps as many as a million of them were American citizens or legal residents.
Whoa.
I’d never been taught about this in school and couldn’t recall a movie, TV show, or book that featured this particular dark corner of US history—and I’ll bet most of you reading this had never encountered that fact either. In the bibliography, I discovered two scholarly books written about the “Great Repatriation.” Reading those led me to a few other sources on the subject, but there wasn’t exactly a treasure trove of materials.
After reading everything I could find, I felt certain this piece of forgotten US history would make a great backdrop for a story about a legal resident trying to avoid this dragnet for an entire population.
Here’s how the repatriation policy was practiced in Texas, Chicago, California, and across the Southwest: if you were brown and looked poor, Immigration agents might stop you on the street or raid your home. They’d demand to see documented proof that you were “legal.” This happened to men on their way to work, women coming home from the market, children at school, couples on a date, and so on. Chances are, you wouldn’t be carrying a birth certificate or any other official papers so, without so much as a court hearing, the agents could put you in the back of a truck with other unfortunates, and you’d be dropped at a border town. From there, a “repatriation train” would take you to the south end of Mexico and leave you there, 3,000 miles or more from home.
This policy only ended because the U.S. entered World War II and suddenly needed more workers on the Homefront and soldiers in the trenches. Imagine getting drafted to fight for a country that had kicked you out a decade earlier….
A tense, sorrowful backdrop to be sure, but I needed more. Two literary influences when I was growing up were The Grapes of Wrath and Les Misérables. From the former, I stole (I’m a thief as well as a liar) the concept of an omniscient narrator interrupting the story periodically to tell the reader things the characters don’t know yet. This creates “dramatic irony,” where the reader is now dreading something terrible that the good guys are about to encounter. From Victor Hugo, I swiped the notion of the innocent person being pursued by an obsessed lawman (and I also managed to get in a trek through the sewers of Houston and a battle at the barricades). Maybe The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno could also be a Broadway musical, movie, and TV show one day!
Anyway, I mixed these elements together, added the Day of the Dead and Mariachis, simmered for two years while I rewrote the story from scratch again and again, and finally I had a work I didn’t mind sending to agents. The 53rd agent I queried took me on and did absolutely nothing for me except provide one good piece of advice: get to work on another book.
So I did, but that’s another backstory.